Cancer continues to be a major health problem, despite significant progress made in the area of treatment. The standard treatment regimes of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgical intervention and combinations of the three, often fail to produce a long lasting cure. In many cases, the cancer patient having undergone the treatment often relapses back to the disease condition after some period of time, further exacerbating the problem, is the severity of these treatment regimes to the patient.
Another factor complicating development of a cancer treatment is that cancers have been found to be caused not by a single biological agent or factor, but rather by a combination of agents and factors. Unlike most medical treatments where a single causative agent or event is the focus of the treatment, cancer therapy requires addressing a plurality of biological factors.
In recent years, research has been directed to developing cancer therapies that utilize the patient's own immune system. One such approach is adoptive immunotherapy. Adoptive immunotherapy calls for using the patient's own cells to generate cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to treat a tumor or cancerous cells. However, this technique remains largely unproven as a viable clinical treatment regime for human patients. Aside from the problem of identifying the proper epitopes with which to immunize the CTL's, the current technology does not provide for a method of presenting a sufficient number of different epitopes to APCs in order to adequately target multiple antigens to effectively treat the cancer. The present invention fulfills unmet needs, as well as providing other benefits.